Photo credit: Mauricio Molizane De Souza
by Jarrod Jones. To many who write about comics or, worse, mire in their thankless promotion, Michael Molcher is a rocksteady source of inspiration and a helping hand. He’s MOLCH-R, the steadfast Brand Manager for the British sci-fi comics anthology 2000 AD and Rebellion Publishing. For devoted readers of Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Absalom, Scarlet Traces, Rogue Trooper, Tyranny Rex, or any of the many motley characters who have graced the magazine, Michael has become the face of 2000 AD and the outfit as a whole. When I ask him if he’s comfortable with that estimation, he plays it down in typical Molcher fashion—modest yet convivial. “I am but a humble minion of Tharg the Mighty, all hail Tharg!”
No, but seriously, Mike: “It’s probably closer to ‘frontman’ in my estimations,” he admits. “The job is all about bringing the joy of 2000 AD to old and new audiences so outreach is an important part of my work.” And Michael’s job is a busy one; when he’s not drilling releases, working convention crowds, assembling the weekly Thrill-Mail newsletter, or any of the countless other tasks that make up his day-to-day, he also hosts the award-winning 2000 AD Thrill-Cast. (Mike also hosted the YouTube series 2000 AD ABC, which is so good that it’s my go-to aid when I pitch all things Tharg to friends and acquaintances.) For a guy as busy as Michael Molcher, you’d think all of that would be more than enough and a job well done.
I Am The Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future is the kind of book that could only be written by someone as devoted to the Thargian cause as Michael. Beyond its finely detailed look at the history and politics of Mega-City One, it’s a stark look at the way the Judge Dredd strip has run apace with the increasingly militarized police forces of America and Britain since its inception in 1977. Says Michael: “The narrative thread that runs through The Book is that at its core Judge Dredd is a satire of the authoritarian politics that have come to remake our world in its own image; amid all the black humour and madness of life in Mega-City One, there’s a reflection of the process that had begun by the time Dredd came along.”
It’s clear that the work has changed Michael—he started writing this during the Black Live Matter protests in 2020—to the point that he reflects on his older essays on Judge Dredd more dimly than he might have before. (“[They] had not only merely scratched the surface but had also delineated the boundaries of my ignorance,” he admits.) You’ll note in this interview that he often drolly refers to I Am The Law as “The Book;” a tome that presents dire things for our past, present, and future if we’re not more vigilant, things he also has to talk about openly as promotion for its existence. It’s tough stuff, but Michael remains in good humor. “[I Am The Law is] the product of shutting myself away in a room for two years and slowly but surely going quite mad,” he tells me. “So to have people finally seeing and talking about the products of my mania is an odd experience.”
With I Am The Law now available in bookstores, I spoke with Michael Molcher about what is possibly the most essential and well-reasoned piece of comics criticism in decades, his take on the misguided belief that the Judge Dredd strip is apolitical, and the one Dredd story he thinks best articulates the worrying state of things in our real lives.
1. Writing something of this enormity isn’t exactly like knocking out an introduction for a collection; this is an entire thesis. How long did this idea for the book lurk in your mind? Was there some professional or personal prodding to get you started on this project?
If you want to go back all the way to the seed, then it’s a cold Easter weekend in North Wales when I first picked up a copy of Best of 2000 AD Monthly—an incredible reprint title, far cheaper than the graphic novels Titan was producing at the time, that allowed me to catch up with the first ‘golden age’ of 2000 AD for about 70p a month.
I’d love to say that I voraciously absorb cultural criticism and in-depth dives into the politics of comics and that this is what inspired me to write The Book, but I’d be lying. It’s pretty much down to a long-past media degree, a decade of interviewing artists and writers, and having read a lot of Judge Dredd.
But the specific foundation of The Book was the articles I wrote for the Judge Dredd: The Mega Collection partwork, some of which delved a little deeper into the themes and ideas behind Dredd—that was ninety volumes in total so it was a hell of a body of work, some 75,000 words in total. So it was suggested I might turn those into a book. It didn’t quite work out that way—ha!
As I began my reading, I noticed that the features had not only merely scratched the surface but had also delineated the boundaries of my ignorance—and the more I read the more themes and ideas from the criminology, political science, and histories I was diving into chimed with themes I recognised in Judge Dredd stories. And it snowballed from there.
2. You begin your book with a look at the proto-matter of 2000 AD: the riotous ‘Kids Rule O.K.’ strip from Action that spooled from the civil tensions, or “crisis in authority,” that took violent shape with the Notting Hill riots of 1976. The brain trust of Mills, Wagner, et al. always had a political mindset with their strips; it’s no wonder that Judge Dredd could one day evolve from this type of energy. Did you want to use the Notting Hill riots/Action parallels to illustrate to potential doubters that Dredd—and comics in general—has ever had a gloved finger on the pulse, the precise opposite of “non-political”?
Not specifically, but it’s the core mission of the book—to show that the context and satire of Judge Dredd goes deeper than just mentioning that it started around the same time as punk. While that’s true, it’s mostly coincidental, though they have their roots in the same place—a growing dissatisfaction with both the status quo and the growing authoritarian impulse in our politics.
The connection to the Notting Hill riots in 1976 is one of those incredibly serendipitous moments you sometimes get when writing, when the stars align and you realise the thread of what you’re writing has some temporal connection you’d not spotted before. In the case of the first chapter of I Am The Law, it was that the issue of Action that contained the first episode of ‘Kids Rule O.K.’—a story featuring lots of violent adolescent anarchy that would help bring down the comic—hit shelves the same week of the Notting Hill riots, which were largely blamed on Black teenage ‘youths’. I nearly fell off my chair when I realised, before cross-checking it about a hundred times.
3. There has always been a contingent of readers who approach Judge Dredd as a power fantasy. A non-stop armada of goofy Cursed Earth mutants and Deadworld beasties and cool guns you can bark orders at. They read Dredd for escape and don’t see the need to internalize the strip any more than they need to. Did you want to address these readers specifically when you began work on I Am The Law?
One of the interesting things about Dredd is how it can act as a Rorschach Test for readers, either confirming their assumptions or challenging them. One thing I didn’t delve into in The Book was what Theodor Adorno called ‘The Authoritarian Personality’; while the thinking and research on this has evolved a lot over the past sixty years it’s a fascinating idea that some people are predisposed to ideas of domination and being dominated.
Anyway, ultimately if they’re someone who doesn’t think Judge Dredd has been “political” from the get-go—or the baffling permutation of this viewpoint, that 2000 AD “never took sides”—then no book will convince them otherwise. The narrative thread that runs through The Book is that at its core Judge Dredd is a satire of the authoritarian politics that have come to remake our world in its own image; amid all the black humour and madness of life in Mega-City One, there’s a reflection of the process that had begun by the time Dredd came along.
4. This being a book with politics very much on its mind, the first wave of readership for I Am The Law will likely consist of fellow travelers—folks who have already observed Dredd as a pertinent, cracked-mirror view of modern policing and are looking for a good, insightful read. But then there will come those folks we’re talking about. Have you encountered any “I’m not convinced” counter-arguments when you were writing/researching this book? If so, how did you share your ideas without proselytizing?
So much of this process has been the product of hearing or reading counter-arguments and picking them apart—it can be very easy to take a surface reading of comics, or to accept a character’s narrative as watertight.
The issue of proselytising really is in the eye of the beholder, but what I hope does come across is the growing anger I felt the more I read, the more I listened, and the more I understood about where we are right now; about how the policing of protests, strikes, communities of colour, the marginalised, and even our bodies—and the politics behind it all—is an intolerable situation with an increasing body count.
I began writing The Book in lockdown and at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. How could anyone write a book about the satire of a hardline cop and not reflect that?
5. The punditry had their knives out for Action when it hit and used it as an example of Britain’s youth corroding into what The Guardian called “anarchic degeneracy.” That level of political bombardment was arguably the peak of public outcry over the content produced by IPC. Why do you suppose the reaction from those same pundits was notably milder towards an authoritarian satire like Judge Dredd? It couldn’t have just been the strip’s sci-fi separation from “reality;” the “dead cribs” of Judge Dredd were just as provocative as Action.
Sci-fi is silly fantasy. That’s the bottom line. That’s what adults think and what protected 2000 AD from their gaze. And it’s a view that persists—just look at the reaction to comic books still, despite all the diversity and narratives of the past fifty years. Pat Mills has mentioned this, how sub-editor Kelvin Gosnell’s memo about launching a sci-fi comic off the success of Battle Picture Weekly and Action came at exactly the right moment to sneak under parents’ radars. For all of his resistance to the idea, including Dan Dare in the first Prog was a marketing masterstroke that convinced parents who grew up on Frank Hampson’s original that this was a new Eagle, even if they then turned their nose up at those first episodes by Ken Armstrong, Pat Mills, and Massimo Belardinelli.
However, it’s worth noting just how extreme Action was—it’s shocking even today, so how they got away with it I have no idea. Though, of course, they didn’t for long. Luckily, blowing up robots and criminals in a future megatropolis isn’t the same as attacking a copper with a chain…
6. I’m especially struck by how you lay out Carlos Ezquerra’s design of Dredd and his tools of the trade in parallel to the subversive armaments employed by SPG officers around the same time as Dredd’s debut. There’s a fetishistic element to the leather and chains look of Dredd and the Judges in the Justice Department, as there is a brutal fetishism to modern policing. If Ezquerra’s initial design was a prescient lampoon of police escalation, does that mean that real-life police have embraced militarization past the point of reason?
Absolutely. ‘Security’ is an escalating principle—no matter how much equipment you buy, you can never feel ‘safe’; indeed security breeds fear and insecurity—and when you add the influx of surplus military equipment into policing in America, it’s a recipe for disaster. In Britain, we reassure ourselves that we don’t have to worry because our police aren’t routinely armed, but the number of armed units has gone beyond all recognition over the last fifty years and the deployment of tasers—hilariously referred to by their manufacturers not as “non-lethal” but as “less lethal”—are a short spell away from being in the hands of every police officer in the country.
In terms of the aesthetics of it all, in 1975 the American writer Susan Sontag wrote a review, called ‘Fascinating Fascism’, of a new book of photography by Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazis’ filmmaker of choice and director of Triumph of the Will. She describes how fascism is embedded in Riefenstahl’s work and, with it, how we have a fascination with images of power, and how as such it represents the enduring and bizarre appeal of fascist ideas. In his ostentatious leather and chains, Dredd both represents and subverts that fascination with images of power, of how ideas can be embedded in art even when we don’t recognise them.
7. You use this quote by former Met Commissioner David McNee: “If you keep off the streets in London and behave yourselves, you won’t have the SPG to worry about.” That line could be lifted verbatim from an officer of the Justice Department. From your observations and research, do you think there’s a way back from the riot shields and bucket-helmets and tanks deployed in city streets?
Frankly, no. This process has been driven by the rhetoric of ‘law and order’, with politicians falling over each other to prove that it is they, and not their opponents, who are ‘tough on crime’, so anyone who tries to walk back towards rehabilitation or social programmes, or even just stopping the proliferation of surveillance and weapons, is vulnerable to an accusation of being ‘soft on crime’. In Britain, we went past the point of no return in the 1990s, when then-Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair spotted that the Conservatives—who had spent the 1980s giving the police all the resources they wanted while gutting the rest of the state, only to find themselves with a recession-driven crime wave—could be outflanked on ‘law and order’. What ensued was an arms race that hasn’t stopped. So long as that kind of politics—in which politicians must endlessly ‘prove’ that they are ‘tougher’ than their opponents—we’re on a hiding to nothing.
Curiously, in the UK the police have undergone a kind of ‘defunding’ in that they were not immune to the austerity measures brought in following the 2008 financial crash, so their numbers are broadly down. This has increased reliance on dystopian technology such as facial recognition, social media monitoring, and data mining, to compensate.
8. It’s a line attributed to George Orwell’s 1984, but I’ve heard you use it before in reference to Judge Dredd: it’s “a warning, not a manual.” How would you categorize I Am The Law? A warning of mounting fascism? A manual detailing how to observe it? Both?
It’s a means to see what’s there already, right in front of us if we would only look. There is a wealth of research out there into the excesses and worrying direction of policing, in the UK there’s groups like Netpol and in the States there are many, many groups who are laying bare the sinews of this creeping authoritarianism. I Am The Law, I hope, complements these while also showing how this British comic has been warning about this for years, albeit through the stories of a fascistic cop from the future.
9. Of the Judge Dredd stories you’ve read—and I’m sure it’s far more than most sensible people have read—which one do you feel best articulates what Dredd is and what his stories have always been about?
I keep coming back to 1981’s “Lawmaster on the Loose,” written by John Wagner and Alan Grant, and drawn by Ron Smith. After the artificial intelligence on board a Judge’s Lawmaster is damaged, it goes on a rampage, gunning down citizens over trivial misdemeanours such as dropping litter, walking on a pavement, or, for one unlucky Judge, ‘bleeding on the public highway’. After it blasts its way into a monorail carriage and slaughters the occupants, Dredd fires at its fuel tank, obliterating the bike, the carriage, and a whole section of the track. As Dredd stands over a huge pile of twisted and bloodied bodies, a sole surviving citizen dangles over the shattered edge of the monorail, holding onto Dredd’s ankles for dear life. “Y-you did it!” he says. “You’re a brave man, Judge Dredd! What would we do without the Judges to protect us?” What a stinging, black joke about the power of the Judges.
Which Dredd story do you read just for laughs?
The PJ Maybe stories. A teenage mass murderer who never gets caught—what’s not to like?
10. I’m a big fan of your voice, Mike. Any chance we’ll be able to listen to a Mike Molcher-read I Am The Law audiobook sometime in the near future?
Haha! I’ve been chasing up on whether we’ll get an audiobook, but I suspect the world has had its fill of my wonky-mouthed mangling of the English language!
I am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future is in stores now. To procure a legal copy of your own, consult your local bookseller or purchase one through the Tharg-approved channels.
More interviews to sate your comics curiosities:
10 things concerning Aubrey Sitterson and his pursuit of good comics [Part 3]
10 things concerning Tate Brombal and Nick Robles of Behold, Behemoth
10 things concerning Jon Tsuei and the rebellious nature of Fox and Hare
